More-Than-Human Codesign: “The First Multispecies Symposium”
Speculative co-design for envisioning sustainable futures
The First Multispecies Symposium
Speculative and participatory design to envision sustainable futures
Research collaboration
- 📅 · Period:
Jun 2021 – Nov 2022 💰 · Collaboration:
Research collaboration, Design Department at Politecnico di Milano.🏛 · Main facility:
Design Department, Politecnico di Milano, Italy🤝 · Partners:
Internal collaboration involving PhD students in Design.⭐ · My Role:
PhD Researcher🏫 · My Affiliation:
PhD Researcher in Design, Design Department", Politecnico di Milano (Italy)🏷️ · Keywords:
Codesign, Speculative design, Provotype, Provocative artifacts, sustainable futures, multispecies, more-than-human, pragmatism, post-humanism.
Overview
The First Multispecies Symposium is a research collaboration among PhD researchers in Design at Politecnico di Milano, exploring speculative and participatory design as tools to envision sustainable futures beyond human-centered paradigms. The project developed a provotype (prototype + provocation) to provoke critical reflections on more-than-human relationships, interspecies justice, and the role of design in navigating complex socio-ecological futures. The provotype is a fictional event set in 2100 in which human and non-human species convene for a multispecies symposium. It served as both a research artifact and a participatory tool, enabling collective reflection on alternative biopolitics, post-humanism, and new forms of human-non-human collaboration. The research resulted in a conceptual framework and a set of speculative design tools for fostering more-than-human co-design processes. 1
Romani A*, Casnati F, Ianniello A (2022) Codesign with more-than-humans. Toward a meta co-design tool for human-non-human collaborations. European Journal of Futures Research, 10, 17. DOI: 10.1186/s40309-022-00205-7
Project partners
Design Department, Politecnico di Milano (IT) 🇮🇹
Team members
Design Department: Francesca Casnati, Alessandro Ianniello, Alessia Romani
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My contribution:
- Design research: Contributed to the theoretical framing of the project, drawing on more-than-human design theory, speculative design, and alternative biopolitics; participated in the co-design and development of the provotype.
- Provotype design: Co-designed the fictional scenario and artifacts part of the "The First Multispecies Symposium", including the narrative and visual of the first version of the provotype.
- Reflective practice: Used the development of the fictional tool to analyze the use of provotypes for sustainable speculative scenarios, reflections on humane-nature-technology interactions, and definition of narratives as element for provocative artifacts use.
- Dissemination: Publications and conference presentations.
Research and dissemination output connected to my work
- 📚 Publications: 1 Journal Article, 2 Conference Papers (1 nominee for best paper)
- 🎤 Presentations: Work presented at academic conferences and industrial events, including Mindtrek 2022: 25th International Academic Mindtrek Conference (Finland and Online, 2022)
Selected dissemination and media outreach
WFSF Conference Berlin 2021
Video of the presentation of the paper "Codesign with more-than-humans: Toward a meta co-design tool for human-non-human collaborations" at WFSF Conference in Berlin, 2021
Publications from the project
Journal articles
- Romani A*, Casnati F, Ianniello A (2022) Codesign with more-than-humans. Toward a meta co-design tool for human-non-human collaborations. European Journal of Futures Research, 10, 17. DOI: 10.1186/s40309-022-00205-7
Conference papers
- Ianniello A*, Romani A, Casnati F (2022) Technology toward more-than-human symbiosis: critical reflections from the design perspective. In: Academic Mindtrek '22: Proceedings of the 25th International Academic Mindtrek Conference, pp. 158–166. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3569219.3569379 Nominee for the Best Paper award
- Casnati F*, Ianniello A, Romani A (2024) Provocation through narratives. New speculative design tools for human-non-human collaborations. In: Zanella F et al. (eds) Multidisciplinary Aspects of Design: Objects, Processes, Experiences and Narratives. Springer Series in Design and Innovation, vol. 37, pp. 747–755. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-49811-4_71